Alchemy Hill Advisory

Comparisons

Advisor, agency or fractional: who should you actually hire?

Three different purchases, routinely confused, with very different failure modes. Here is what each is genuinely for.

The distinction

An advisor is bought for the decision. An agency is bought for the making. A fractional executive is bought for the seat. Paying one to do another’s job is the most common and most expensive mistake in this market.

You need an advisor

The decision itself is the constraint.

  • You do not yet know what the right move is
  • You have conflicting internal views at senior level
  • You need something defensible to take upward, to a board or an investor
  • You have been burned by execution built on an unexamined brief

You need an agency or a fractional seat

The decision is made and the constraint is capacity or ownership.

  • The strategy exists, is agreed, and nothing is shipping, so you need making
  • Nobody senior owns the function day to day, so you need a seat
  • The work is continuous rather than a decision point
  • You can brief it clearly enough that someone could start on Monday

Steal this

The Brief test

Try to write the brief. One page. Then look at what you produced.

  1. Can you state, in one sentence, what decision this work depends on?
  2. Is that decision already made, and could you defend it under challenge?
  3. Does the brief describe an outcome, or a list of deliverables?
  4. If you handed it to three suppliers, would they come back with the same interpretation?

Reading it: If you cannot write the brief, you do not have an execution problem yet. Buying making or capacity at that point turns an unresolved decision into an expensive one.

The order is decision, then seat, then making. Most of the waste in this market comes from buying them in the wrong sequence.

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